10/06/2006

Venice: a city beyond price

John Berendt, The Times

On Monday experts will argue that one of the world's treasures should be allowed to drown. If they win, John Berendt says, more than La Serenissima will be lost.

Should Venice be saved? Join the debate.

THE CITY OF FALLING ANGELS
John Berendt
Sceptre, £20

IT HAS BEEN 40 YEARS SINCE the world awoke to the possibility of losing Venice. The awakening began slowly but ominously in early November 1966, when several days of torrential rain swelled rivers all across northern Italy. Then, in the pre-dawn hours of November 4, a sudden drop in barometric pressure, combined with warm temperatures and violent winds over the Adriatic, created an unusual tidal swell that surged northward into the Venetian lagoon, inundating all of Venice. That was not the end of it, however.

Pressure from the wind-driven Adriatic continued for hours, blocking the normal outflow of water from the lagoon during what should have been the low-tide cycle. Instead, a second high tide poured in on top of the first one, creating the highest acqua alta (high water) recorded in Venice: 6ft 4in (1.94 metres). St Mark's Square was under 4ft of water.

It was not the sort of high water one could walk over light-heartedly on raised duckboards. It was an invasive, angry sea, topped by waves that dashed against buildings, sank hundreds of boats. and devastated ground-floor dwellings and businesses all over the city.

In the storm's aftermath, attention focused at first on Florence, where the Arno had overflowed its banks by 20ft, killing 30 people and damaging or destroying a staggering portion of its artistic heritage. Although Florence had suffered more grievously from the storm, Venice faced a continuing threat from flooding, because it lay a mere 40-43in above sea level, and acqua alta had been occurring with disturbing frequency in recent years. At the beginning of the 20th century St Mark's Square, the city's lowest point, had flooded nine times a year; by the 1960s it was happening about 25 times a year, and at the century's end it would be up to 60 times a year.

Taking stock of Venice after the flood, investigators found the city in desperate shape: houses, churches, and palaces were rotting; many were structurally unsound and some were on the verge of collapsing into adjacent canals. Acid rain had eaten at the sculptural ornaments of buildings; paintings and frescoes were not only decaying but were housed in precarious conditions - in churches with leaky roofs, for example.

It was at this point that private citizens around the world, art lovers in particular, became alarmed about Venice and mobilised to save it. Among the first was the former British Ambassador to Italy, Sir Ashley Clarke, who moved his Italian Art and Archives Rescue Fund from Florence to Venice in 1971, renaming it Venice in Peril. Shortly afterwards a group of Americans split off from the World Monuments Fund and formed an organisation called Save Venice. Eventually there were 33 private committees sponsoring restorations of hundreds of paintings, sculptures, façades, roofs and entire buildings in Venice.

While all these private restoration projects were going on it was tacitly understood that the Italian Government would take responsibility for the most important undertaking of all: designing and building a mechanism to prevent the recurrence of acqua alta. By 1971 the Italians had their solution: a system of moveable dikes consisting of 79 panels that would lie flat on the bottom of the lagoon most of the time, but when storm surges were forecast would rise up on great hinges, forming a dam at each of the Lido's three openings to the Adriatic. The system, called MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), would cost between £2 billion and £3 billion.

The announcement of the MOSE proposal sparked a rancorous debate in Italy that continues to this day. Environmentalists claim that the sea level is rising at such a rate that in 20 or 30 years the gates would have to be closed so often they would interrupt the cleansing action of the twice-daily tides, and the lagoon would become fatally polluted. The urgency of this argument depends on which estimate of the rate of sea-level rise one uses - and the estimates vary from 8-40in (20-100cm) per century.

Even MOSE's proponents acknowledge that the system would be only a temporary solution and would have to be scrapped altogether when the sea level became too high. An alternative would be a so-called "Dutch solution", a permanent dyke that could be improved or strengthened as the need arose. Any permanent closure would necessitate the construction of a massive sewage treatment system and a reworking of the lagoon's entire hydrology.

The MOSE project has been an on-again, off-again affair, and though Silvio Berlusconi agreed to its construction before leaving office as Prime Minister recently, it has since become bogged down in the familiar murk of uncertainty.

No doubt the Venetians will go on arguing about whether or not they should build the MOSE, but a turning point in the international attitude toward Venice and its future may well be apparent on Monday evening, when a debate at the Royal Geographical Society will consider the proposition: Enough money has been spent saving Venice.

The debate is being sponsored, surprisingly, by Venice in Peril, which is, in effect, offering a platform to people who want it to go out of business. I suspect, however, that a shrewd realism lies at the bottom of it. Until now Venice has been considered a special case - even the laws passed by the Italian legislature in 1973 to save Venice are called leggi speciali.

But all that may be changing. The idea of saving Venice is being now seen in a much broader and far more urgent context; a context that becomes all too clear when you consider who is arguing on Monday that Venice has already had enough money: Sir David King, the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser and prominent campaigner for the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases! Global warming! These are the new political hot buttons. The question "What shall we do about Venice?" is being supplanted by the larger question "What shall we do about Rotterdam, New York, London, Tokyo, Miami, Bangladesh, Alexandria, New Orleans, Calcutta, Shanghai, and dozens of other low-lying cities where hundreds of millions of people live?" Venice in Peril? Only 58,000 people live in Venice. Shouldn't there be a London in Peril? Sir David will be joined by the economist John Kay. Since they are both pragmatists, their arguments are likely to be free of sentiment. They will emphasise the larger picture, the survival of the planet compared with the survival of a paltry 3 square miles (7.8sq km) of it. Sir David will no doubt cite the grim report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the melting of the polar ice cap, the disappearance of the snow on Kilimanjaro and of glaciers (both of which are strikingly illustrated with before-and-after photographs in Al Gore's new movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth). He will probably say also that the MOSE would be of any use for only two or three decades.

And he will probably be right about that.

Mr Kay will argue that - because of the staggering cost of warding off global catastrophe - saving Venice would be a waste of money. I'm not so sure about that.

My sympathies lie with those who want to go on saving Venice, a position that will be defended by the novelist and historian A. N. Wilson and the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert.

They will be arguing from the humanist point of view. The flooding of huge coastal areas is one of the horrific challenges that lie ahead. Our response will inevitably be a rescue effort determined by priority. We will have no choice but to abandon most of the threatened acreage, but a fraction of it will be worth saving, no matter the cost. And Venice is in the must-save category.

Why? Because it is not only the most beautiful city in the world, it is, inch for inch, a triumph of ingenuity and grace, a monument to man's reclamation of land from water, to survival, and because it has the power to awe and inspire anyone lucky enough to wander through it.

As to whether it's worth the money, I look at it this way: the bill for saving Venice, the most magical place on earth, is equivalent to what it costs to wage war in Iraq for one month.

Venice: Biography of a city state